"When I first held my uncle Tex's camera, it felt heavier than metal and glass. He'd walked the streets of east London carrying it for decades, capturing a spirit that went overlooked. The mundane became something else when he looked at it. He caught people as they really were: quietly proud, fiercely unique and full of life. His shots were never about glamour or style, although they often had that in spades; They were about connection. You could feel the life in them."
"For years his work sat in boxes and came dangerously close to being lost forever. Thanks to the care of my aunt Victoria and her husband Connor, those negatives survived. A record not only of a man's passion, but of a London that is not so lost after all. Turns out the city doesn't change so much as it keeps moving forward. The stories Tex told are still being written."
Acclaimed podcast The Hackney and Newham Social History Club, produced by Immediate Theatre and hosted by Sue Elliot Nicholls, presents season three 'Same Streets, Different Lives' focusing on Bandele 'Tex' Ajetunmobi. Tex was a Nigerian-British tailor and street photographer who documented east London from the 1940s to the 1980s. Newham schoolteacher Victoria Loughran, her husband Connor, and fashion photographer Tracer Ital rescued and preserved Tex's negatives. The photographs now reside in institutions including the Tate and Autograph. Seven podcast episodes tell Tex's life, the rescue of his archive, and the images' testimony to everyday connection, identity, and a changing city.
Read at London On The Inside
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